Unfortunately, Peterson's writing and YouTube videos are a bolus of nonsense, resentment, and bigotry. This page provides resources explaining the problems with Peterson's worldview and arguments. It is not meant to be all-inclusive, but hopefully can be helpful nonetheless.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says of the Toronto killer. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy. That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the end.

“Half the men fail,” he says, meaning that they don’t procreate. “And no one cares about the men who fail.”

To be clear, Jordan Peterson is not a neo-Nazi, but there’s a reason he’s as popular as he is on the alt-right. You’ll never hear him use the phrase “We must secure a future for our white children”; what you will hear him say is that, while there does appear to be a causal relationship between empowering women and economic growth, we have to consider whether this is good for society, “‘’cause the birth rate is plummeting.” He doesn’t call for a “white ethnostate,” but he does retweet Daily Caller articles with opening lines like: “Yet again an American city is being torn apart by black rioters.” He has dedicated two-and-a-half-hour-long YouTube videos to “identity politics and the Marxist lie of white privilege.”

But, having examined Peterson’s work closely, I think the “misinterpretation” of Peterson is only partially a result of leftists reading him through an ideological prism. A more important reason why Peterson is “misinterpreted” is that he is so consistently vague and vacillating that it’s impossible to tell what he is “actually saying.” People can have such angry arguments about Peterson, seeing him as everything from a fascist apologist to an Enlightenment liberal, because his vacuous words are a kind of Rorschach test onto which countless interpretations can be projected.

it's hard to even know what to say except, "humans aren't lobsters human aren't lobsters humans aren't FUCKING LOBSTERS WE'RE NOT FUCKING LOBSTERS HOW CAN WE EVEN BE ARGUING ABOUT IT THEY ARE LOBSTERS! LOBSTERS! THEY'RE FUCKING LOBSTERS!!! WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN TALKING ABOUT

12 Rules For Life is paleo-intellectualism crossed with a Hallmark card. We’re all going to die in a ball of fire.

Gremlin 2 Studies explains that "Jordan Peterson" is in fact a brilliant piece of performance art.

This Jordan Peterson character, however, is something else altogether. His commitment to the bit is commendable. Peterson is portrayed as a pompous, self-serious buffoon. Though I have to admit, the fake Canadian accent is a bit over-the-top, it really challenges the believability of the character.

The truth is, if you were interested in protecting free expression, you wouldn’t be expending energy defending charlatans and ideologues like Jordan Peterson. You wouldn’t be writing columns lambasting innocuous human rights legislation designed to protect the marginalized. You wouldn’t be contorting into intellectual pretzels in an effort to convince yourself that by speaking out against laws designed to protect transpeople, you were speaking out against neoliberal power centres.

There are are a lot of important free speech issues out there, including newspapers’ right to publish national security leaks, access to a free and open Internet, and the right to protest. But Jordan Peterson’s “free speech” claims are confused and based on unproven claims around Canadian law.

U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson took to Twitter on October 26 to broadcast the Facebook profiles of two students who helped organize a protest of a Ryerson free speech event where Peterson was scheduled to speak; it was cancelled in August.

What first drew my attention to Peterson’s ties to the Kwakwaka’wakw, however, was the way he seemed to be exploiting that “friendship.” He appeared to be deploying it as a talisman to ward off any social consequences for helping spread racial stereotypes about Indigenous people. It was a defence rooted in identity politics—his language was okay, because he is, after all, an “Indian” through his connection to Charles Joseph. Yet Peterson himself, in a Youtube video, called that “whole group-identity thing” a “pathology” and “reprehensible.”

Yet Peterson rarely speaks about anti-Semitism itself, even though he says he’s been obsessed with the Holocaust since he was a teenager and lectures on it frequently. Critics say this omission may encourage anti-Semitism among Peterson’s followers, who range from avowed neo-Nazi communities like the Daily Stormer to frustrated young men looking for a scapegoat.

The conflation of postmodernism and Marxism may come as some surprise to those who identify as belonging to either side of the equation. Perhaps the best-known theorization of postmodernity, Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, conceives of the period as an object of inquiry to which Marxist analysis may be applied, not a theoretical perspective. Today, it is not uncommon to see condemnations of postmodernism and pleas for a return to Enlightenment rationality in the pages of Jacobin. But Peterson is not the only ideologue to elide the distinction between these usually opposed frameworks. This strange conspiracy theory has increasingly gained traction among the far right, famously appearing in 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, the manifesto Anders Brevik distributed before he murdered 77 people in Norway.

In all respects, Peterson’s ancient wisdom is unmistakably modern. The “tradition” he promotes stretches no further back than the late nineteenth century, when there first emerged a sinister correlation between intellectual exhortations to toughen up and strongmen politics. This was a period during which intellectual quacks flourished by hawking creeds of redemption and purification while political and economic crises deepened and faith in democracy and capitalism faltered.

Peterson’s philosophy reflects the brutal nature of capitalism’s irrational demand that we sacrifice human beings for profit, which he transforms into a call for individuals to sacrifice themselves for something transcendent and holy. In other words, Peterson tries to Latinize the bourgeois kitsch with mediocre calls of self-actualization. But the self is not actualized: it is told to kill or be killed in capitalism’s endless competition.

But charismatic leadership has never been about logical consistency or even rational coherence. Charismatic leaders serve a function in times of rapid social change, when long-standing social identities are threatened. They advertise a glorious future in which the group they minister to will take its rightful place and their enemies will be vanquished. In return for these promises, charismatic leaders elicit worshipful, even delusional, devotion in their followers.

If Peterson spent more time with literary texts instead of just throwing them into facile YouTube videos, he might know they do not act as bluntly as he wishes them to act. Literary texts are disco balls, spraying glittery bits of imagery and light in all directions. Peterson’s vision cannot resonate at the level of philosophy or literary criticism, where the rules are too demanding. Where Peterson excels is at the level of carnival-barker chicanery. He’s for people who want to hear that women are bad.

Leaving aside the comparison of deeply divergent lineages, there is enormous variability in social structures even among our closest primate relatives. Bonobos have promiscuous sex and matriarchy as part of theirs. The point is that even where hierarchical systems have a presumed genetic basis, this is a rather malleable trait evolutionarily and the specific forms of social hierarchies can be quite different even among species with brains that are extremely similar.

The way Peterson frames it, it’s like we have the benefit of a giant social experiment in the form of the cold socialist North; we took away all of the legal differences between the sexes and their treatment, and there are still noticeable differences between them, which allows us to conclude that these remaining differences are natural and ineradicable. QED — What hubris would have to possess us before we try to pervert the homeostasis of the world any further.

So JP is making an object lesson of how this kid is representative of what is wrong with the world (so little respect for traditional authority?) without remembering the very first thing he mentioned about this kid: his nanny was in a car accident and he has been shuffled around

Like Ross Douthat or Bret Stephens in cases we've looked at, he wants his audience to hear it, but he doesn't want the responsibility of having said it, so he keeps weaseling between saying it and denying it. Newman is trying to pin him down: "Well, are you saying this, and if not, what?" and he's replying no, but he's unable to give her an alternative. Or what, Conor Friedersdorf, am I missing here? What is the subtle idea Newman is cruelly and brutally caricaturing?